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Paul A.M. Dirac - Banquet Speech

Paul A.M. Dirac's speech at the Nobel
Banquet in Stockholm, December 10, 1933

I should like to thank you all very much
for the great honour you have done to me, and the kindness you
have shown me, which I hardly feel I deserve.

I think that in replying on an occasion
like this one should say something about the character of the
work for which the prize has been awarded. This would be fairly
easy in the case of the Nobel prizes in some subjects, for
example peace. But the physicist is at a disadvantage in this
respect on account of the very specialized nature of his work,
which cannot be made intelligible without an intensive
preliminary course of study. All the same I think I may be able
to give you some idea of the processes of thought which must be
used, because these same processes of thought may be applied to
other problems much more immediately connected with the welfare
of the human race and for this reason much more familiar to us
all, namely economic problems. There is in my opinion a great
similarity between the problems provided by the mysterious
behavior of the atom and those provided by the present economic
paradoxes confronting the world. In both cases one is given a
great many facts which are expressible with numbers, and one has
to find the underlying principles. The methods of theoretical
physics should be applicable to all those branches of thought in
which the essential features are expressible with numbers.

I should like to suggest to you that the
cause of all the economic troubles is that we have an economic
system which tries to maintain an equality of value between two
things, which it would be better to recognise from the beginning
as of unequal value. These two things are the receipt of a
certain single payment (say 100 crowns) and the receipt of a
regular income (say 3 crowns a year) through all eternity. The
course of events is continually showing that the second of these
is more highly valued than the first. The shortage of buyers,
which the world is suffering from, is readily understood, not as
due to people not wishing to obtain possession of goods, but as
people being unwilling to part with something which might earn a
regular income in exchange for those goods. May I ask you to
trace out for yourselves how all the obscurities become clear, if
one assumes from the beginning that a regular income is worth
incomparably more, in fact infinitely more, in the mathematical
sense, than any single payment? In doing so I think you would
then get a better insight into the way in which a physical theory
is fitted in with the facts than you could get from studying
popular books on physics.